Lily can hear Ruth breathing next to her now. Both she and June seem to be dozing—June punctuates her grandmother’s labored inhales with short, quick sighs, as if she’s excited even in sleep. Yesterday afternoon, Lily walked into the girls’ room to find that they had rolled out between them a six-foot-long stretch of IKEA paper and were scribbling madly, and not only scribbling but painting—they had taken out the bin of paints that they were not supposed to use without Lily’s help. But before she could scold them, she saw what they were making. Two dresses. June’s of black circles, strung like a garland in the shape of a dress, made with Sharpie—another thing they are not allowed to play with; permanence, fumes, etc., … But look! they cried. Lily looked. It’s coal! June cried, and it took Lily a moment to realize: her daughter got coal from the kohl in the Esther book, the stuff the maidens, all except for Esther, used to darken their eyes. The circles saturated the paper to the point of dampness. They shone. It was a dress for a queen, or a funeral. And Rosie’s. Lily stepped farther into the room. She could feel the girls watching her, afraid she was going to make them start cleaning up. But she was only getting a better view. Rosie’s dress was like a muumuu that had been dipped in a tropical rave, densely patterned with green diamonds, pink spirals, purple lightning bolts, orange tongues. Were they tongues? It didn’t matter. Rosie looked up at her—into her—with tensed brows, as dark and luxuriant as her grandmother’s before the chemo started to thin them. Lily got it, in a way she had not before—their desire for the dresses was not about having something but being it.
She turns onto her side. Her mother and her younger daughter look nothing alike, but they nap identically: noses up, mouths open. June smiles at something, goes slack again. Lily’s heart squeezes. It amazes her that the girls believe she is doing it, making those dresses. Where and when they think this is happening, she does not know—perhaps they have in their mind a kind of Rumpelstiltskin cellar where she works through the night—but of course that’s not the point, is it? The point is that they trust her. Even when she doesn’t trust herself.
“Mom?”
Nothing. Then a drowsy “Mm …?”
“I’ll find a machine,” Lily says. “I do want you to teach me. To make the dresses. Okay?”
Nothing. A clanging comes from Vanderbilt Avenue. They are building wooden crates to protect the trees before laying down new cable, but it sounds as if someone is hitting metal against metal.
Silence again.
Then a rustling. Ruth’s hair rubbing her pillow as she nods.
GLOUCESTER, MA
VEE
A Sublime Representative of Self-Centered Womanhood
The road up through the woods is narrow enough that Vee can walk in one of the tracks while smacking, with a long stick, the saplings that grow along the side. She has not walked this road before, though it looks similar enough to others that she loses herself for a time, walking slowly, enjoying the solid thwack as her stick hits the trees. She jumps, in fact leaves the ground, when she hears an engine approaching from below. The road turned to gravel a good half mile back, which she took to mean—as it had for other roads—that no more houses lay ahead, and that the gravel, when it petered out, would turn into a footpath into the rocky moors the locals call Dogtown, at which point Vee would turn around. She is not naïve enough to wander alone into that place—she knows of a violent history, though she has never bothered studying it; she senses, correctly, that there is more to come. The one time she did dare venture in, pushing past the ragged boundary and following a path through briars and blueberry bushes and poison ivy and stunted trees, she came to a massive rock, more than twice her height and the width of two cars, into which was carved, in foot-tall letters: HELP MOTHER. She turned and marched back as quickly as she could without running, her blood pounding, her eyes trying to search the trees on either side of her without appearing afraid. Now, at the sound of the engine, her instinct is the same. She resumes walking so as not to appear rattled, hitting the trees in a steady rhythm even as her cigarette hand quickly adjusts her hat a bit lower over the side of her face. She inhales deeply, trying to calm herself; she blows smoke toward the trees. She is not calm. Puff thwack puff thwack puff, until a man’s voice husks at her: “What’d they do to you?” Then Vee is staring at the back of a red pickup truck and smelling the pipe smoke that’s trailing out from the cab. Quickly, the truck is gone around the bend.
She should turn around. But she can’t. It’s the pipe smoke, she tells herself, as she continues up the road in the dust the truck has left behind. She loves the smell with an almost scary intensity; she feels, when she smells it, as if she might fall down. Her father and grandfather were pipe smokers of the kind that set their pipes down only for photographs, though there is one black-and-white of senator and governor together—it hangs still in the yacht club’s billiard room—in which both men, son- and father-in-law, blow smoke at the camera. Vee’s father was smoking a pipe when he had the stroke that killed him—his coffin smelled of it, if you leaned close enough.
Vee did not adore her father or her grandfather. Neither man allowed that. Even in their slippers or swimming trunks they appeared monumental. They could not comfort Vee, like her mother or her grandmother, but neither did they become real to her in the way her mother and grandmother did. The women’s realness came with a cost; it made them impossible not to hate, in a way—their comforting and combing and correcting, their bodies and hands and hair always near. The men never got close enough to ruin the illusion of their omnipotence—they were immortal, somehow, even in death. So what the smell gives her now is a feeling of safety. If she falls down, the smell tells her, she will be picked up. It makes her feel warm, though the day is cold.
It is mid-December already. She has been at Rosemary’s more than a month, and though she still has no idea what she will do next, her initial panic has for the most part ebbed. She no longer fears at any given moment that Rosemary or Philip will kick her out, and the tabloids rarely mention her now. Also, she got her period. She was about to send off for a kit from a laboratory in North Carolina—she’d asked Rosemary to drop her off at the library, where they had a new book called Our Bodies, Ourselves that provided instructions and an address—but then she bled, and another layer of fear fell away. She almost shouted from the bathroom. She felt like celebrating. But what would Rosemary, at twelve weeks now, her waist thickened even to Vee’s eye, make of that? And Vee hadn’t even shared her fear that she might be pregnant. The lightness the friends established early in Vee’s “visit” has somehow persisted, so that Vee has still not asked Rosemary about the cross that was burned on her lawn, and Rosemary hasn’t pressed Vee for any details beyond the basics of what happened in her town house the night before she tripped up Rosemary’s steps with nothing but a bag and her hat. They talk about memories, and their parents, and what they will drink, and Rosemary’s pregnancy, and whether the laundry—still Vee’s job—needs doing. At Thanksgiving, they debated stuffing recipes, then cooked together, and Philip, though he still asks when Vee plans to leave, allowed Vee to be at the dinner since Vee had no family and Rosemary’s parents, who knew and loved Vee—though they rigorously avoided any discussion of what she was doing there, alone—were the only guests.